Monday, November 30, 2009

A sickening first-hand report from a mom whose kids are getting brainwashed at school:

When did global warming turn into a forced religion?

My daughter came home from school re cently with a spring in her step and a song on her lips. With no foreshadowing -- or time to call an exorcist -- out came this chilling refrain:

" . . . You can hear the warning -- GLOBAL WARMING . . . "

By the time her father and I removed our jaws from the floor, we had learned that:

A) All the kids had been coerced into singing this catchy ditty, which we called "The Warming Song," at a concert for parents.

B) Further song lyrics scolded selfish adults (that would be us) for polluting our planet and causing a warming scourge that would, in no short order, kill all the polar bears and threaten the birds and bees.

C) There was no deprogramming session on the menu. And no arguing allowed.

This NY Post report by Andrea Peyser--highlighting the Stalinist-style indoctrination of her own kids-- would be chilling to me save for the fact that this sort of thing is going on all the time, courtesy of the teachers' unions (mostly in big cities) who are more than happy to do their part to turn the nation's children into an up and coming generation of left-wing mind-numbed robots. So it's old news really, although we're mightily glad that someone's decided to report it.

Schools are supposed to educate, not propagandize for one side of an argument, the now-discredited side in this case. Parents of both school-aged and college-aged students need to wake up and start intervening in their schools to put an end to this kind of propaganda.

Click the link, and you get to this story from the UK Telegraph online:

Leading British scientists at the University of East Anglia, who were accused of manipulating climate change data - dubbed Cimategate - have agreed to publish their figures in full.

The U-turn by the university follows a week of controversy after the emergence of hundreds of leaked emails, "stolen" by hackers and published online, triggered claims that the academics had massaged statistics.

In a statement welcomed by climate change sceptics, the university said it would make all the data accessible as soon as possible, once its Climatic Research Unit (CRU) had negotiated its release from a range of non-publication agreements.

Simple question: Of what use is this "data" if, as we and countless others have discovered, the original, allegedly factual data upon which this "data" was based was allegedly thrown out with the trash as the perps scientists allege?

All they'll be "releasing" is the same batch of lies they've been feeding gullible journos and socialist pols for at least two decades.

Sunday, November 29, 2009

You gotta love this. The "global warming" fanatics, the academic Sultans of Smug, are under the kind of withering crossfire now that they've sought to avoid for a generation by tenuring in only those who fervently subscribe to their own socialist, statist view which is really what all of this weird science is about. What is going to be even more amusing than this scandal itself is the tap dancing we'll see from the slimy politicians who bought into this hoax hook, line, and sinker. (Except the Goracle, who is too loaded with hubris and thickheadedness ever to admit he was wrong.)

Scary thing--none of these clowns, professorial or political, has any history whatever of being deterred by the truth. Wanna bet we see the Democrat-led Congress pushing their cap and tax legislation anyway?

Kinda funny when the Goracle shows up in London's Financial Times with a sermon essentially favoring the long term goals of socialism over the allegedly short term goals of capitalism. By inference, socialism leads to a more responsible stewardship of the planet, which, of course is defined by Gore as ending "global warming," a thesis that's now been exploded by the East Anglia data scandal we've chronicled here.

Money sentence:

We must exercise our voting rights, work with global regulators to improve shareholder rights and responsibilities, and more aggressively hold company boards to the highest standards of governance and ethics.

There he goes again. Note the one-world reference to "global regulators." The "global warming" scam is just another step toward the hard left's goal of a New World Order based on socialism and state control. And Gore is all for it.

FYI, Gore's co-author here, David Blood, probably wrote the whole piece. Along with Gore, he leads an LLC called "Generation Management." It's obviously an investment company built on supporting "sustainable technologies" and such. It's a known fact that Gore has already made large investments in companies and areas that will benefit by the kind of cap and tax legislation he's championing. Thus, this whole piece is an elaborate, self-serving commercial for the Goracle's personal money machine.

Just when you think this scandal can't get any worse, it does. The East Anglia climate miscreants now "admit" that all the original data upon which their vast hoax was based--is GONE. Hot off the presses in today's (London) Sunday Times:

Scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

Guess we now have the real reason why they refused to share the data. It doesn't exist. What exactly was the data and where did it go?

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.

One commentator to this online story compares it to a "dog ate my homework" excuse. My take: the real reason our fraudsters weren't "able" to provide the raw data is that, like that famous Monty Python parrot, it "is no more."

Our faux scientists would, of course, have us continue to believe in the purity of the original dataset as well as the manipulations that were performed on said data to to arrive at the conclusion that we're all going to die, maybe tomorrow, if our left-leaning governing elites don't carbon-tax us into oblivion. Or as the denizens of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) put it somewhat wistfully on their website:

“We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”

"Value-added." That's rich. Let it never be said that the standup comics at the CRU lack a sense of humor.

Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. “The CRU is basically saying, ‘Trust us’. So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science,” he said.

Pens another commentator with a jaunty, scholarly air:

"Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus" It is getting harder and harder to defend these clowns.

Indeed. Yet another commentator observes:

One of [the stonewallers] said in the leaked emails that he'd rather delete the raw data than release it, maybe he did just that !

Another tries to defend the CRU by claiming we could restore the missing data by backing the current, manipulated data back through the algorithms imposed on the initial dataset. In other words, by wiping the lipstick off the pig, we can get a better picture of what the pig actually looked like a long time ago. A lovely idea, but naive. This also presupposes that the East Anglians have a pristine record of and justification for each and every manipulation they've performed on the lost data and that we trust them to be honest about it. As if!!

What really happened here? In the end, only one of two things, I think.

A. The East Anglians really did thoughtlessly throw out the original dataset as they stated. In this case, they are sloppy and stupid scientists which casts doubt on the quality and/or veracity of any research they've performed, whether it involves climate change or any other issues. Or,

B. The East Anglians dumped the original data quite recently when they realized the UK Freedom of Information Act would require them to make it public, thus instantly unmasking them as absolute frauds in the eyes of the public.

Whether the data exited our ever-warming planet via route A or B is immaterial. The consequences are the same: a lose-lose situation for the perpetrators of this massive hoax.

Saturday, November 28, 2009

More specifically, in the left column of our blog. In addition to links to our most recent posts, we've long carried link lists of Enemies and pals, aka Good Guys.

I've recently checked these links disposing of those that no longer work. Meanwhile, I've added to and updated our Good Guys list and am doing the same with our Enemies, who, in point of fact, aren't actually enemies since they probably don't care if I exist. I list 'em only so you can see the kind of slugs we oppose in action whenever you wish. I'm assuming you are all too intelligent to fall for their propaganda.

In late-breaking aesthetic news, I've changed the color scheme of our verbiage a bit, just to spruce things up and dust off the cobwebs. Since we're essentially into the rarified (and under-covered) realm of cultural and sociopolitical criticism here, there's no point in making this blog's appearance busy, fussy, and distracting or loading it with ads whose throbbing Flash attachments and thundering Shockwaves spill out over the page, cover the text, and generally piss people off.

(PS: for those not yet born when the Trickster was in the White House, a hat tip to Dick and other long-departed Nixonians for the useful "Enemies List" concept. Ironically, the Clintonistas and the Obamanationals have been far more skilled at smashing their own Enemies than Tricky Dick ever was, despite the MSM opprobrium that's been continually heaped on the only president who's ever resigned from office.)

The blogosphere has really been on the move on this issue, featuring loads and loads of revelations and commentary as the "global warming" scandal is relentlessly laid bare.

Let's briefly lay out our own observations here (my own, actually):

Global temperatures go up and they go down for considerable periods of time. That's natural history as it stands.

No one quite knows why this is or whether it's actually controllable.

The second bullet point is certainly something any real scientist would call "interesting," and it's well worth investigating. But no one yet has made an independently verifiable airtight case in support of any theory which is essentially what you have to do in a scientifically valid proof.

That's about it for me. The very notion that something so malleable, so generally out of our control, and so subject to forces outside of our control (Mt. St. Helens, asteroids, sunspots, etc.) has been entirely influenced by mankind's transgressions beyond the shadow of a doubt is ludicrous to the point of hubris.

Over the past week, we've finally gotten proof that the whole "global warming consensus" (AWG to the cognoscenti) has been gamed all along, something we'd always suspected given the Stalinist treatment accorded anyone daring to dissent from said consensus. From the long-ruined humanities to the now-discredited sciences, this is what happens to the integrity of your academic discipline when political outcome becomes your methodology.

The story is still growing longer and longer legs. For your reading pleasure, here's a brief compendium of the latest useful links:

"Warmergate Wrap" from the always appreciated Aussie Daily Telegraph. Money quote from Col. Mortimer: "This person/persons [the hacker or hackers who exposed ClimateGate] may well have broken the backs of the Global Warming Priests who did everything in their power to make sure that the common man, and those who would oppose them, had no direct access to the Spoken Word of God."

"A Climate Scientist Who Engages Skeptics." Sagacious advice to would-be science students about how the scientific method (open inquiry, open datasets, etc.) should work but didn't work in the current scandal. Surprisingly evenhanded for a New York Times-linked site that's by and for eco-fanatics.

"Data-leak lessons learned from 'Climategate' hack." What the ClimateGate perps should have done to conceal their fraud. Not exactly helpful in this context as it will encourage the eco-terrorists to perfect their techniques for concealment. Nonetheless, it shows you what a bunch of duffers the current ClimateGate perps were when it came to elementary computer security, which doesn't give you much confidence in their own cliamate "science," come to think of it.

"IPCC too "politicised" to survive." An Aussie take on the issue. A good place to wrap this up, too, as he helpfully includes the following scurrilous YouTube allegory. (PS: I can't vouch for the accuracy of the translations here!)

Hope so. The current Attorney General's step-by-step assault on traditional American values, mores, laws, and freedom's really shifted into high gear this week. Exhibit A: his poorly-reasoned free pass for ACORN that effectively turns their taxpayer-funded spigot back on even after Congress explicitly defunded it.

Holder has neared or perhaps already crossed the Rubicon on a number of key issues. Let's go over them briefly in case you forgot:

He's announced his intention (recently severely downplayed) to investigate the CIA and other interrogators with criminal acts with regard to the severe questioning of various and sundry Al Qaeda thugs and mass-murderers. Just who in Hades is the enemy here? This, no doubt, will encourage CIA agents to take big risks for their country in the future.

Meanwhile, he declined to prosecute Black Panther thugs who violently intimidated Philadelphia voters going to the polls in the last election. (If Republicans had done this, they'd already be on Death Row.)

Returning to the Clinton administration's disastrous mantra that terrorism is a "legal issue" and not an act of war (in spite of 9/11 which even most card-carrying liberals will acknowledge was an act of war) he has chosen to try the despicable Sheikh Mohammed not only as a civil defendent in an American court of law, but with all the privileges accorded to a US citizen. And he's proposing to conduct this farce where? Right in New York City in a court house mere blocks from The Hole--all that remains of the World Trade Center. Even many bleeding-heart Manhattan elites are aghast at the sheer effrontery and insensitivity of this decision. We're more amazed at its indefensible alleged legality. A good, succinct overview of the issue here. New York denizen and pal Luther gives his take on it here.

Just last week, as mentioned above and while no one was watching, Holder and his Justice Department directly circumvented a recent act of Congress that explicitly de-funded the criminal enterprise collectively known as ACORN. He says it's okay now to give them their money. Not a whimper from the MSM on this wave-of-the-hand reversal. Such a surprise.

In this most recent outrage, by employing typical Washingtonspeak and legal language tap dancing, Holder & Co. have indicated that they regard the Congressional act vs. ACORN as a "bill of attainder" expressly prohibited by the Constitution. For those who haven't read the Constitution, a bill of attainder is effectively a law passed after the fact to punish a person or entity for past allegations/offenses that weren't specifically prohibited before the new law in question was passed.

Thus, Holder & Crew allege that the US needs to pay ACORN for any contracts, expired or ongoing, that were in force BEFORE Congress passed the law. This was probably not Congress' intent, although in a Democrat-led Congress, I wouldn't put it past the leadership to have constructed a linguistic trap door in the legislation that Holder could use to pull this little trick off.

The bill of attainder language in the Constitution is actually a very, very good thing. Otherwise, nearly any crank could go back in history and harass or punish an opponent for a current legal activity by passing a law against it and applying it retroactively. But in this case, Holder is creatively and selectively re-writing the intent of the Constitution. What ACORN perpetrated in the 2008 elections was a criminal activity even before the Congressional prohibition was passed.

When a defense contractor runs legally afoul of a DoD customer, as does happen from time to time, the customer has every right not only to immediately terminate the relevant current contract but to prohibit said contractor from competing for similar business for a lengthy period afterward. The contractor may also be subject to considerable fines in the meantime. I've seen this happen. What makes ACORN subject to special treatment in this regard?

ACORN has a clear history of abusing its charter not to mention its non-profit status. Its behavior in the 2008 general elections demonstrates that the organization clearly functioned as an organ of the Democrat Party, violating the terms of its nonprofit charter by definition. Going further, it's also clear that many if not most of its local offices have casually engaged in voter fraud amounting to outright racketeering, punishable under the RICO statutes. Some even blame ACORN's massive voter fraud for throwing the election to Obama in 2008. I don't happen to buy this theory--Obama's win was too lopsided. (I do think one, maybe two states were effectively "stolen" by the fraud, but this still wasn't enough to make up McCain's electoral deficit.)

The only reason ACORN hasn't been prosecuted for voter fraud on a national level is that the party they cheated for, at taxpayer-funded expense no less, entirely controls both the Executive and Legislative branches. The Dems are unlikely to allow such a valuable (if questionable) ally to get whacked by the legal system it's systematically violated, particularly since ACORN's well-documented, well-executed criminal activities are so helpful in fulfilling the Democrats' insatiable lust for absolute power over the lives of all Americans.

Clearly, ACORN's nonprofit status must clearly, the stated legal remedy for its illegal political activities in violation of its nonprofit charter. But Holder and the Dems won't let this happen either. That might open a Pandora's Box of like charges against "nonprofit" organizations like Greenpeace, PETA, the Sierra Club, and numerous others that have created clever subterfuges and sub-organizations that illegally direct money to America's Socialist Party.

The outrageous, anti-American decisions consistently being handed down by Holder's Injustice Department have gone beyond scandalous at this point. They are clearly damaging. And I think that on several levels, they're illegal, particularly in the four instances cited above. While at least one brave member of Congress is raising his voice against these Constitutional abuses, I'm surprised others haven't joined him. (Although Holder did have the political savvy to let the ACORN cat out of the bag over the Thanksgiving holidays when people were least likely to pay attention.)

The press will try to give Holder a pass on this. Ergo, we ourselves need to start focusing attention on the miserable state of this current renegade Justice Department. Meanwhile, it's time for Repubs to show a little guts and start finding ways to bring the legal system to bear on this Attorney General, clearly the best friend American socialists have had in the Justice Department in decades. If Holder hasn't committed "high crimes and misdemeanors" quite yet, he's getting awfully close. We'll be watching. We encourage you to do so as well. Otherwise, our Constitution will continue to be slowly eviscerated clause by clause until nothing is left.

Friday, November 27, 2009

What I'm about to put out here is very old news--for anyone who was paying attention in Y2K. But I'm raising the issue for a reason.

Former Veep Al Gore--you know, the tiresome pedant and "global warming expert" who's trying to get us all taxed into oblivion for the sake of what's now being unmasked as a scientific hoax--that Al Gore is far from being the towering intellectual everyone claims him to be.

One of the raps on George W. Bush, who ran successfully against Gore in 2000, was that he was, well, just plain dumb and had terrible grades in college. The press pretty much propagated this myth. But astoundingly, the Washington Post, of all places, managed to get the college transcripts Gore would never release. The Posties published an article on this and demonstrated with facts and figures that Gore was a marginal, indifferent student at best and one who never quite managed to finish his law degree at Vanderbilt, or his divinity degree for that matter which is kinda funny when you think of all the reverence that's accorded to him now.

The article, by David Maraniss and Ellen Nakashima, allows that Gore may have copped better SAT scores than W. But in the end, it's grades, not SATs that count, and Gore's transcripts were dismal, particularly in, gasp, science. More recently, Noel Sheppard elaborated on the Post article here, emphasizing Gore's D in natural science. Bush actually comes out slightly better than the Goracle over all. Surprise. More piling on from Larry Elder here.

Bottom line: Bush was no Rhodes Scholar. Yet he looks better on paper than the allegedly smarter Gore. But even though this piece ran in a reliably liberal paper and was thus unassailable, the MSM never really picked up on Gore's thickheadedness during the 2000 election. I wonder why.

I'm bringing this back up at this time because I want to make sure our readers and anyone who links here can see in black and white that the patron saint of "global warming" has absolutely no scientific credibility as an alleged authority on the issue. Lacking a legal degree, he has "no controlling legal authority" either. And having failed also to score a divinity degree, looks like his high priestly mantle is suspect as well.

As the ongoing "global warming" hoax unfolds, I wonder if we'll be connecting more of the dots back to this dour, hectoring, truly despicable individual who's become, for me at least, the poster child for the sneering condescension that's the hallmark of wealthy, elite leftists who think they have a right to control our lives even if it takes outright fraud to do it.

PS: Guess who was worse than Bush and dumber than Gore? Right you are, another Bush opponent, the gravitas-laden John Kerry. Fun facts here and here. Gore and Kerry. Dumb and dumber.

East Anglia "global warming" frauds, step aside. Apparently, you've got some company in New Zealand, home of some of our favorite white wines.

The New Zealand Government’s chief climate advisory unit NIWA is under fire for allegedly massaging raw climate data to show a global warming trend that wasn’t there.

The scandal breaks as fears grow worldwide that corruption of climate science is not confined to just Britain’s CRU climate research centre.

Oops. Looks like more "objective," "peer-reviewed" "science" has just gurgled down the crapper. Read the details--quite interesting from a (real) scientific point of view--here.

Seems like the problem with New Zealand's own weird science is similar to the one in the UK. The data have been selectively manipulated and not in a scientifically valid way. Wonder which national domino will fall next?

A plausible, well written explanation of the original East Anglia data issues is available here. An even geekier one is available here.

(Please note:This second link, while a good one from a technical standpoint, appears to have been hacked by eco-thugs. Instead of what you expect, all links in the initial paragraph direct you toward a YouTube video featuring a heavy-handed, almost laughable dose of distasteful Greenpeace anti-everything propaganda. Don't waste your time with these scurrilous links unless you want to get in a bad mood. Hopefully the site will notice the hack and get it fixed.)

Thursday, November 26, 2009

More to write, but I gotta go. Mrs. Wonker and I are taking ourselves and the daughter of one of our Ohio friends off to our other pad in Berkeley Springs, WV where we'll spend the next two days as well as having Thanksgiving Dinner at a delightful B&B in town which opens a few times a year to serve special dinners. I'll get back to the grind here Friday or Saturday. Meanwhile, enjoy your own family get-together and enjoy Norman Rockwell's classic table setting for the America that once was and most certainly will be again.

I've been doing some much-needed surgery to our list of Good Guys and Enemies in our column to the left. One or two former Good Guys have been deleted due either to their sites folding, their mission changing, etc. Haven't added any Enemies lately although I need to attend to that one as well, since the legion of bad guys has grown exponentially since last year's national elections.

A major addition to the Good Fellows today is Andrew Breitbart. I'm listing his main site, which has mainly become a news aggregation list a la Drudge (featuring links that will make real Americans feel better in these dark days). I'm also adding two newer sites, linked to the main one, that provide up-to-the-minute news on "Big Government" and "Big Hollywood" and the political scandals therein. Even newer, "Breitbart TV," also goes on the list since, with MSNBC vs. Fox for example, the political battle is if anything more lively now on the cable channels than it is in the currently moribund newspaper world. Breitbart TV, however, covers other stuff tailor-made for video addicts. (Like me, with the recent addition of a swell new Samsung HDTV to my audio setup along with Verizon FiOS which works great, at least for moi.)

My reasons for the additions? Simple. Although denounced as an "amateur" journalist by the MSMers, Breitbart--once an associate of Matt Drudge--has actually been breaking major stories, including, most recently, the ongoing ACORN scandal. (Seemingly reliable bio here.) He's in possession of an apparently endless series of videos exposing these miscreants who use their tax-free status to support far-left political causes and help win elections by stuffing ballot boxes for left-certified candidates. He plans to release them slowly, in-series, to counter a frenzied (and lame) defense that's being mounted by ACORN and its Marxist supporters.

Breitbart, with the Government and Hollywood as his main beats, is actually reporting the news you should be getting in your ever-shrinking liberal daily rag. (With the exception of the always reliable Washington Times, BTW, where I work on the side as their music critic.)

So welcome to Breitbart, Big Hollywood, and Big Government. They'll be reliably providing you with Thanksgiving Turkeys today, tomorrow, and hopefully for years to come.

Seems like the US isn't the only place where "too-big-to-fail" companies run amok. In a real Middle East shocker, looks like a couple of monster companies in Dubai can't pay their bills. Shoot, are they running out of petro-dollars? We're talking billions of US $s here. Euromarkets, open today, are going down hard, although London is hard to track since they're having a system outage as of this writing.

Looks like part of Thanksgiving Day will involve putting stops on a bunch of positions in our portfolios today in anticipation of a bad opening tomorrow. Market futures are down 84 points as of this posting, although these can change wildly before trading re-opens tomorrow. (You can follow updated futures here if you're into that sort of thing.)

Just thought you'd like to know since this kind of stuff tends not to get a lot of coverage until after the fact, since it's not generally interesting to the media unless they can blame it on Bush.

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

We all know about the Attorney General's decision to hold civilian trials for those responsible for planning the worst terrorist attack there's ever been. This is one New Yorker's response.

The presence of these monsters in our city has aroused enormous distress. We know what Muslim terrorists do when their members are in civilian trials. Those in the courtroom grandstand about their bizarre interpretation of Islam. Those on the outside plot to murder bystanders, court officers, the law itself. What the Administration is doing is aiding and abetting an enemy of the United States. In the constitution, that's called treason.

President Obama and his lackey apparently believe that it's reason, but nobody's fooled. This is their chance to hold a "Truth Commission" on the Bush Administration and the prosecution of a war that was started by Muslim terror bombers murdering three thousand Americans. It is clear on whose side President Obama and his Administration stand. And New Yorkers wonder, at least those not half-asleep over a copy of the latest Times report on Navy Seals slapping around a mass-murdering suspect, how long the rest of America is going to stand for Congressional majorities and an Administration which stands, on principle, against our country.

Barack Obama promised us not only transparency, but also a new respect for science. In soothing tones, he asserted that his administration was “restoring scientific integrity to government decision-making.”...In our new Enlightenment of Ivy League Guardians, we were to return to the rule of reason and logic. Obama would lead us away from the superstitious world of Bush’s evangelical Christianity, “intelligent design,” and Neanderthal moral opposition to human-embryo stem-cell research...Instead, we are seeing an unprecedented distortion of science — indeed, an attack on the inductive method itself. Facts and reason are trumped by Chicago-style politics, politically correct dogma, and postmodern relativism....The New War Against Reason, Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 11/25/2009

The writer has talked to many people about Climategate, and about the astonishing refusal of the President and his Congressional majorities to even acknowledge that their legislative program on climate is based on criminally falsified data and an ideological campaign to discredit reports based on real data through criminal collusion with journal editors and openly slanderous attacks on researchers with different results. One suspects that citizens of Russia and Germany felt much the same way when reports began to come down the grapevine about the preposterously criminal leadership they were cheering in downtown Moscow and Berlin. It is hard to believe that the national leadership of a great society can pursue irrational objectives, making every effort to drive an agenda so out of touch with reality as to endanger the survival of the nation they purport to preserve, protect and defend.

But in every initiative this Administration and Congress have pursued in the last eleven months, they have done precisely that. In the face of staggering foreign debt, they have tripled the federal annual debt. In the face of urgent needs and requests from the battlefield, they have juggled, bobbled, bumbled and fumbled for six months. In the face of massive likely resistance from the largest organized lobby in the United States, they have demanded that an unwanted national health care initiative be paid for by cutting health care expenditures for seniors by almost five hundred billion dollars. In the face of two million demonstrators in Washington, expressing their opinions about the Administration and Congress's irrational fiscal policies, they pretended, like Louis the XVI, that those millions didn't exist. Confronted by evidence of baldfaced lies and falsified reports about jobs "created and saved" with the so-called Stimulus, which has vastly increased the federal deficit, they have demanded another Stimulus package. Thundering about resetting foreign policy, the President has acted like a jackass with our major creditors, betrayed a dozen allies in Europe on behalf of a gangster leadership in the Kremlin, and given credence to thugs like Hugo Chavez. Knowing full well that arms for Mexican drug gangs come from Central American and South American militaries, and from guerrilla movements, the administration uses the presence of heavily armed narco armies in Mexico as an excuse to attack Second Amendment rights of Americans.

Like the Bolsheviks, this administration's allies and ideological initiatives suggest only one thing: that we are at present governed by a criminal conspiracy. 2010 is a month away, Congressional elections eleven months later. We know what has to be done.

Here's what’s undeniable: If a divergence exists between measured temperatures and those derived from dendrochronological data after (circa) 1960, then discarding only the post-1960 figures is disingenuous, to say the least. The very existence of a divergence betrays a potential serious flaw in the process by which temperatures are reconstructed...If it's bogus beyond a set threshold, then any honest man of science would instinctively question its integrity prior to that boundary. And only the lowliest would apply a hack in order to produce a desired result...And to do so without declaring as such in a footnote on every chart in every report in every study in every book in every classroom on every website that such a corrupt process is relied upon is not just a crime against science, it’s a crime against mankind...Indeed, miners of the CRU folder have unearthed dozens of e-mail threads and supporting documents revealing much to loathe about this cadre of hucksters and their vile intentions. This veritable goldmine has given us tales ranging from evidence destruction to spitting on the Freedom of Information Act on both sides of the Atlantic. But the now-irrefutable evidence that alarmists have indeed been cooking the data for at least a decade may be the most important strike in human history...CRU's Source Code: Climategate Uncovered, Marc Shepard, American Thinker, 11/25/2009

In the 1930s, Bolshevik Dictator Josef Stalin demanded that scientists prove his conception that evolution was driven by nurture, not by nature. The idea was completely in keeping with Soviet communism, which ideology maintained that nature was subject to whatever human beings wished to do with her. From the get-go, this countermanded the essentials of scientific research. You don't force the data to fit your theory. You test your theory against the data. If the theory doesn't fit, it goes out and another effort is made. Stalin reversed this process and set back Soviet biological science by a century.

What the CRU computer programs Marc Shepard discusses contain (these were part of the files grabbed from the CRU servers) are well-documented proof that researchers openly and continuously fudged the data on climate change. What programmers do as a matter of course is that they document, or label, each function in a program. And time and time in the codes, the CRU FORTRAN and other programs show that the functions were designed to falsify results. Regarding Stalin's bizarre scientific demands, Arthur Koestler (Darkness at Noon,The Case of the Midwife Toad, said the same thing Shepard did today, that what was done in the name of politicized science was a crime against human knowledge, and against human society. Why?

Science is the basis of our civilization. We keep ourselves housed, fed, clothed, entertained, and secure with worldwide use of technological applications of science. The Global Warming, or Anthropogenic Climate Change, conspiracy -- what else is it? -- is as much an attack on civilized life as 9/11, seeking to undercut foundational values in pursuit of political ends. What ends?

If we had fallen for this, we would have put at risk the survival of technological civilization. And, the support of the Obama Administration for cap-and-trade and the Copenhagen treaties have to be seen in that light, as a radical attack on the very society they claim to be upholding.

I've noted that my recent "global warming" postings have garnered precisely zero comments over the last few days. Part of the reason is, I'm sure, that Luther and I, mightily distracted by a host of family issues, have been pretty irregular bloggers over the last year or so--and readers tend to move on if they're not getting their accustomed daily dose.

Nonetheless, previous postings on this subject have generally resulted in numerous commentaries by climate-change cranks who revile us as the moral equivalent of Holocaust-deniers and usually offer the same piles of bogus data recently unmasked as either fraudulent or manipulated into a fraudulent state. These cranks have included various sock puppets. (One of whom was probably the early Glenn Greenwald before he became allegedly respectable. More backup here.)

What the "global warming" fanatics would generally do, it appears, is troll the net constantly via Google or other search engines or algorithms, burrowing into every nook and cranny to unearth "global warming" nonbelievers wherever they might lurk. Once discovered, these unfortunates would be bombarded with all manner of smears, slanders, and bogus scientific data which they, of course, accepted unquestioningly, figuring that everyone else should be as gullible as they, I guess. It happened to us on numerous occasions.

This time around, as I've indicated, we've been met with stony commentary silence by the climate freakologists. There are only two possible explanations:

The outing of the apparent East Anglia climate change data fraud has stunned the True Believers into a befuddled silence. Or,

Due to the East Anglia scandal, the eco-freaks are employing the same time-honored tenured professor trick that tenured professors (including the alleged frauds) have employed from time immemorial: the academic cone of silence. The enemy is simply ignored to death. If he's an academic, he's quietly denied authorial access to peer-reviewed journals, one by one, passed over for departmental promotions, or, if a newbie, denied tenure and sent packing for an uncertain future since he's been blackballed. The cone of silence (and here) also extends to the more popular media. The MSM find out soon enough who's on the outs and make sure he never gets any coverage, thus keeping his name and theories out of web searches because the unfortunate dude is simply not there. He's vanished. Professionally dead. A nice Stalinist trick--execution, effectively, but without the bloody mess.

We suspect both tactics are being employed right now with reference to our own comments as well as those of better known bloggers. If these people can't silence you, they'll try to make you disappear by robbing you of the oxygen of media coverage.

Unfortunately, this time, we're catching the scent of a few MSM renegades who, degraded though the profession has become, still sniff a real story here and can't resist, even though they might be risking their careers. Ditto a few professors, like this one. These links are getting out on the web. Meanwhile, the borrowed data are being mined.

I suspect this story is not going to go away. We, at least, will do our part to keep things front and center as events unfold.

As Obamanation thrusts ever forward in its drive to control our lives, it's nice to know that free enterprise still insists on flourishing no matter what the obstacles. Lest you imagine that this site's resident right-wing extremists are dour, humorless prudes, take a gander at how at least one gentleman employs firm but flexible rules in conducting his own highly profitable business. Enjoy. And don't touch the merchandise.

Michael Mann (University of Pennsylvania), the Goracle, and the rest of "global warming's" Merry Hoaxsters star in this YouTube video, posted earlier today via the invaluable Instapundit. Re-posting here in case you didn't catch it. Holiday fun for those who knew early on that this was, at heart, a Marxist, statist fraud. Happy Thanksgiving!

Monday, November 23, 2009

This in from Viscount Monckton, the dude that the Goracle refused to debate on the "global warming" hoax that promises to drive the U.S. economy into the drink--its intention all along, of course. Duly noting the fraud, intimidation, and coverup by politically motivated scientists in the UK and US that was exposed in the recent East Anglia email hack, Viscount M lays it all out for you:

This is what they did — these climate “scientists” on whose unsupported word the world’s classe politique proposes to set up an unelected global government this December in Copenhagen, with vast and unprecedented powers to control all formerly free markets, to tax wealthy nations and all of their financial transactions, to regulate the economic and environmental affairs of all nations, and to confiscate and extinguish all patent and intellectual property rights.

The tiny, close-knit clique of climate scientists who invented and now drive the “global warming” fraud — for fraud is what we now know it to be — tampered with temperature data so assiduously that, on the recent admission of one of them, land temperatures since 1980 have risen twice as fast as ocean temperatures. One of the thousands of emails recently circulated by a whistleblower at the University of East Anglia, where one of the world’s four global-temperature datasets is compiled, reveals that data were altered so as to prevent a recent decline in temperature from showing in the record. In fact, there has been no statistically significant “global warming” for 15 years — and there has been rapid and significant cooling for nine years...

Sunday, November 22, 2009

No news on the sources of funding. Regardless, these ads will irritate all the right people.

Well, true. But then again, when have you ever seen the left's funding sources for its propaganda detailed? This info is kept hidden for good reason--they often fund their activities via illegal political subsidiaries of nonprofit organization. More on this in a later post.

Tiger concludes:

Of course, all of the disaster scenarios that justify massive regulation of greenhouse gas depend from the various climate models. If the models do not work in the short run, is there so much as a shred of evidence that they are accurately predicting the climate decades from now?

To the larger issue, once again: the hard left is warping science (and covering up its tracks) to conceal the fact that their shell games are at all times geared toward gaining ever more control over the lives of the unwashed masses. Who are we to question them?

I've been following on the web for the last few days a fascinating story wherein someone hacked a British "global warming" database (for lack of a better descriptor) whose emails revealed an ongoing, Stalinist-style attempt to purge "dissenters" from peer-reviewed journals.

Surprisingly, the left-leaning Washington Post actually picked up the story today (bet it hasn't appeared in the New York Times). In an article titled "In the trenches on climate change, hostility among foes," reporter Juliet Eilperin provides a condensed, blow-by-blow account of this conspiracy. Money quote, referencing academic papers that poke holes in the "global warming" conspiracy theory:

"I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report," [Phil] Jones writes. "Kevin and I will keep them out somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

More:

Jones and [Michael E.] Mann discuss how they can pressure an academic journal not to accept the work of climate skeptics with whom they disagree. "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal," Mann writes.

"I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor," Jones replies.

A certain amount of this ongoing snit is but one example of the casual, reprehensible kind of skulduggery that's an everyday fact of life in academia where tenured-for-life professors go through adulthood acting like spoiled brats. Nonetheless, adding this scoop to other evidence such as the now-discredited "hockey stick chart" that kicked the "global warming" hoax into high gear is helping concerned citizens get a better grasp on this immense scam whose aim is, as always, to allow greater and greater state intrusions into our lives.

The unmasking of this ongoing attempt to smear and silence critics is important, and it's one of the main reasons why I took pains to provide our readers with my (currently) 6-part synopsis yesterday detailing how the hard left tag teams its opposition via smears and manipulated verbiage to shut off all discussion that's inconvenient to the Party line.

Many of Althouse's commentators pick this right up and run with it rather astutely. Here's one example:

"In other words, use muscle and not mind if you don’t like the results. Get rid of the editor and put an agreeable apparatchik in his place."

Yup. Here's another:

I had not realized that the hockey stick thing was already discredited. Funny, I have friends still citing that.

I will tell you that when the CRU [Climate Research Institute] said they'd deleted all their primary data my 14 year old son said: wonder what they are hiding.

From the mouths of babes. Althouse commentator "lucid" also gets the political implications:

This is a very good example of the left's opposition to free speech, of which they are so often an enemy. They are so sure they are right and that other people are wrong that to them it is morally correct to suprress the speech, communication, and opinions of others. It is anti-democratic and an instance of the left's ties to a Marxist perspective. For Marx, free speech simply meant letting the wrong people control public opion and this is how many leftists feel about free speech also. It is one of the odd links that often appears between liberalism, Marxism, and fascism.

Gee, wish I'd written that. Let's wrap this with a final Althouse commentator's comment, a bit more of a downer but realistic:

I doubt if anything will come of these revelations. Man-caused global warming is such a convenient stick with which to beat modern civilization and in particular the US that I don't think it really matters to our "betters" in the international community and the media whether it has any basis in fact or objective observation.

I hate to think this observation might prove true. But the way things have been going in Obamanation, it sure might. Now that we have a real window open on this longstanding statist hoax, however, we need to keep the pressure on until the full extent of the associated academic, scientific, and political fraud and collusion is fully exposed.

My exploration of the language and propaganda tools of the left will provisionally end here, although I'll be making additions and emendations from time to time. This edition should give us enough tools to be able to meaningfully criticize the astonishing assault on American core values that's being undertaken by the current Administration, their radical allies in Congress, and their unwitting, nearly clueless allies in the voting public--the latter of whom are only beginning to get a clue as to what's about to be taken from them.

A key to understanding the Marxist-Leninist universe is the concept of the dialectic. Until recent generations, any college graduate, particularly in the liberal arts, was reasonably well schooled in classical Western concepts such as syllogistic logic and the scientific method of experimentation, both of which were intended to allow the student to arrive at objective, dispassionate, and therefore valid conclusions when presented with a set of circumstances or data.

The Marxian dialectic, however, is an entirely different way of reaching conclusions. To oversimplify somewhat, the dialectic replaces objective reasoning as a tool for achieving valid results. The dialectical way of thinking views life as a constant struggle, a dynamic that involves and even requires a continuous, evolutionary battle of opposites in order to move toward a conclusion that is itself evolving. It's a dynamic rather than a system.

William Blake once famously observed that without opposites there is no motion--a very early and primitive way of expressing the same thing and one that he explored extensively in his difficult and complicated "prophetic" books of poetry. For a Marxist, you can never arrive--you are always arriving. The battle of opposites is never done. You merely struggle toward the next (temporary) conclusion.

In the Marxian political and economic realm, the dialectic is best expressed in terms of "class struggle," a concept that's much easier to understand. Here the rich are pitted against the poor even as both are effectively pitted against the middle class. It's a recipe for continuous chaos, a chaos that's supposed to proceed in dialectical fits and starts toward its inevitable if provisional conclusion in the "dictatorship of the proletariat." In the process, of course, there must "temporarily" be a Marxist-Leninist state to help guide the outcome, after which the state will usefully "wither away." In current practice, that's wishful thinking, since this state, once achieved, perpetuates its power by continually recasting the definition of class struggle.

Since the social classes in America, while they exist, are more malleable and changeable than in almost every other state on the planet, deeper leftists hit upon the perfect plan. They'd recreate (economic) class struggle by recasting it in terms of race and gender.

To make a long story short, beginning in the 1960s in this country, the left infiltrated, took over, and ultimately dominated the legitimate political battles for racial and gender equality and rechanneled the energy of those efforts to create precisely the opposite effect. Even as Americans began to work genuinely toward achieving both objectives, the leftists continued to agitate as if this were not so, serving not to overcome but to perpetuate real or perceived racial or gender barriers. In so doing, they have been able to perpetuate rather than end any real or perceived discrimination.

The dialectical logic of this is compelling. Were racial and gender problems really to be solved or even to be perceived to be solved, it would immediately cause an end to this new "class struggle," thus robbing the hard left of a valuable tool for continuing the kind of agitation that was (and is) tearing the fabric of traditional American values apart.

Furthermore, to perpetuate racial and gender class struggle, the left employed and continues to employ the type of Stalinist language tricks described in earlier installments, in this case promiscuously throwing around the slanderous terms "racist" and "sexist" to smear opponents and drive them from the public sphere. This is key to understanding what's been going on behind the scenes in the current administration. But it's also a key to understanding where the hard left, after a nearly insurmountable string of successes, may have jumped the shark with this tactic. With the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States, the hard left may have unwittingly and permanently lost the use of a pair of phenomenally useful propaganda tools not to mention an easy way to smear and discredit their opponents.

As I mentioned above, we'll wrap this mini-series for now with this entry. But I hope it will provide any skeptics in the audience with the rationale behind a series of blog entries I hope to post over the next couple of weeks that will describe and unmask the near-Herculean effort being mounted by the current Administration and its Congressional and media minions to turn America into a socialist country in under two years. It's an effort that is at now being at least dimly perceived by the average citizen. But a dim perception is not going to be enough to stop what's going on, which even a lot of traditional contemporary liberals might very well oppose. It's going to take a concerted effort to mount an effective counterattack before the left achieves its ultimate objective of socialism and world order. And understanding the left's underhanded language tricks and methodology is an important first step in this counterattack.

Okay, we've gone through a brief explanation of terminology and language that people belonging to the catch all term of "Communist" use to obscure who they really are. We've also briefly described how these folks use language to demonize and diminish those who oppose them. As we move along here, note carefully that the assault by the left on those who refuse to go along with their program involves the logical fallacy of the ad hominem argument. For those who took logic in college (is it actually taught any more?), a logical fallacy is essentially a fallacious argument used to win that argument under phony pretenses.

An argument ad hominem by the left "wins" said argument by snaring those in the audience who can't tell the difference and persuading them by smearing or slandering (usually without evidence) their opponents and demonizing them. This distracts the unaware, leads them to distrust (without evidence) the opponent and thus to trust the ad hominem attacker. In addition, it frees the attacker from any necessity for making an argument of actual substance. Since the left actually possesses no arguments of actual substance (merely dogma enunciated by the Party cognoscenti which may or may not be fact-based), ad hominem vilification of the opposition is their best approach, as it covers up the fact that they don't have a logical leg to stand on. While primitive, this is also pretty sophisticated in its own way. Since few people, save for attorneys, bother with logic any more, it's easier and easier to scam an audience with such a non-argument.

Further, by doing this again and again, and eliminating your opposition by these means, you rob your opponent's side of vital credibility (albeit wrongly and cheaply), which, over time, requires you to engage less and less. This is great for people like our leftist friends who basically have no time for the unconverted or for those who aren't gullible.

One of the flavors of ad hominem used by the left relies on a general misunderstanding of the terms I introduced at the top of this entry. All these terms, in the end, describe people who are devoted to the principles set out by Karl Marx. Problem is, even those well-versed in Marxism tend to disagree with the nuance of any definition setting down the meaning of those words. They'll pick a trivial quarrel with a portion of your definition and distract the audience to the point where no one is paying any attention any more. And so they win by default.

We're not really going to try to define each of these terms here. This isn't a cop out. It's only an acknowledgment that it's intentionally (on the part of the hard left) impossible to come up with a definition of any of these words that will please them. Hence, they'll reject out of hand any attempted definition which, of course, will prove that you actually don't know what you're talking about and therefore have no credibility.

For purposes of my entries here, I'm taking the position of a philosopher who is going to stick with his initial basic concepts but who, sometimes by trial and error, will refine those concepts and related definitions over time to make them more precise.

This is tough with labels for the left. In the first place, if you try to stick a leftist with one of these labels, he'll use the variation of ad hominem described above to peg you as an idiot who can therefore be ignored. This rope-a-dope frees him from having to confront the fact that his belief system is antithetical to the average little d democrat. Having to do so would be a great inconvenience.

In the second place, by refusing to really pin down the definition of these terms for the public, a leftist fallaciously gains that greatest of all political powers, "plausible deniability." That is, you can flat out deny that X is so, even if you can't prove it, because your opponent is an idiot. Plausible deniability for most audiences is quite enough, and today's short attention spans allow the miscreant to escape without having to explain anything.

For the record, my loose definitions of the above terms are as follows:

Communist: a hard leftist operating in the tradition of Karl Marx as explained by Engels and practically implemented by Lenin. The tradition includes a hatred of the upper classes, a contempt for the middle classes, and a desire to exterminate or "retrain" all of them by violence if necessary (or fun)

Bolshevik: an early name for the above that's still used semi-humorously sometimes, in contemporary writing. Variant: Bolshie.

Trotskyite: Lenin's co-revolutionary and a master philosopher of violence. Running afoul of Stalin, he was exiled and eventually hunted down and killed in Mexico. In the process, somehow, Trotsky--who in the Russian Revolution's initial stages was as bloodthirsty as anyone else--somehow got the reputation as a more intellectual Marxist, more "moderate" even. Thus, he became anathema to true believers, particularly Stalinists, perhaps mostly because believing in Trotsky during Stalin's reign was guaranteed to get you killed. People still call themselves Trotskyites or Trotskyists in some quarters which always makes for furious, murderous arguments on the left. Shouting "Trotsky" in a room full of leftists is pretty much again to shouting "Fire" in a movie theater. The man has been overcome by the legend, and no two leftists will agree.

Marxist-Leninist: see the above. I call them Communists and consider this a synonym. Castro, at least the early Fidel, would have been happy to agree.

Stalinist: After Joseph Stalin. Basically any Marxist-Leninist who has gone completely psycho. It's a demonstrable fact that Stalin, not Hitler, was the greatest mass murderer of all time. If you even had a family name of someone unrelated whom Stalin didn't like, you and your entire family were likely to be hunted down and exterminated. Just to make sure your family's corpse wouldn't rise again in the afterlife, Stalin loved staging "show trials" of his enemies. They were, of course, always convicted, sentenced to death or exile in Siberia (i.e., death), their property, such as it was, confiscated, their very names effaced from monuments or reference works. Basically, the scorched earth approach. In point of fact, many of today's leftist use and prefer to attack their enemies with a more nuanced version of the Stalinist approach in this country. This means that the opponents generally don't die. But their reputations do. Blogs like the Daily Kos--essentially a carnival of non-stop, vicious ad hominem slanders of anyone who opposes them--are perhaps the best exemples of the kind of Stalinism that drives the left today.

Left, New Left: terms that describe the earlier American left (roughly from 1920-1960), and the Boomer radicals who followed. The former were sneakier (a la Popular Front subversion), while the Boomers of the New Left preferred violence, street theater, and confrontation a la Stalin.

Socialist: Like Communist, but with slightly less of a pejorative connotation, socialists basically favor a flavorless Marxism in which a benevolent state takes everyone's money via massive taxes and redistributes it the way it sees fit, making everyone equally miserable. Europe perfected this cradle to grave government interventionism after WWII. The Nobel Prize hacks, sensing in Barack Obama a fellow traveler, granted him a Peace Prize to encourage him to follow in their steps. The bulk of today's Democrat politicians are now at least socialists, with many being considerably worse.

Anarchists: Real anarchists are very few today. Those who do exist are, for some, indistinguishable from libertarians. In point of fact, libertarians believe in very, very limited government, pretty much cops and an army to keep order domestically and abroad but that's about it. Anarchists go one step further and want no government of any kind. The thuggish gangs in the "Mad Max" series of movies are pretty much what real anarchists want, I guess. In point of fact though, for roughly the last 15 years or so, "anarchist" has become another code word, like "progressive," behind which particularly violent leftist hide. By proclaiming they're "anarchists," they can dissasociate their violence from the actions of the Marxists who quietly support the violence so the Marxists can proclaim plausible deniability. (See how this works.) The funny thing about today's "anarchists" (whose most popular activities involve causing violence and destruction at World Bank meetings) is that most are easy to identify. They wear stocking masks and dress like ninjas.

[xx] rights: A weasel term of the left, a way of creating a kind of anarchy by declaring every whim to be a "Constitutional right." I.e., animal rights, which is sort of funny since animals don't have any rights at all in the wild. Ask a zebra who's just been brought down by a pride of lions and about to be served for dinner. Creating neverending streams of "rights," which ca then serve as the excuse for demonstrations, you can create an endless onslaught on order and on all things the middle class holds dear.

Mainstream: used to describe Marxist-Leninist thought. That's mainstream. Anything at odds with it is right-wing extremism.

Liberal: A once proud term even used by Republicans to describe themselves, meaning "freedom-loving," "individualistic," "compassionate" but not condescending, and basically all things that every good American could believe in. Now warped into yet another benign synonym, if not for Communist, then certainly for Socialist. "Liberal" has become so imprecise, deliberately so, that its now only marginally useful to Republicans who stoop to ad hominem attacks on the left as it does now conjure up for many some distasteful socialist connotations.

Sincere: A catch all adjective used facilely to justify the actions of any of the above. As in "the anarchists who trashed downtown Seattle were sincere in their beliefs." My usual rejoinder to this cheap excuse: "Hitler was sincere, too."

These definitions are meant to be useful, if provisional. Scholars, if any of them even care, will probably denounce all of them. But the "real" definitions for these and related terms are a moving target as implemented by the left. By picking such things as these definitions apart, one is gradually distracted from the main argument--capitalism vs. communism--and loses interest, allowing the left a series of continuous, low key, but very real incremental propaganda victories while at least obscuring if not obliterating any meaningful counterattack by those who oppose them.

Without getting into a lot of details--a good bit that I'm about to describe here stems from the "Popular Front" activities in the 1930s and the thought of underground Italian Communist radical Antonio Gramsci--I'm now going to briefly describe some key language tricks that derive from my previous discussion of "truth," which is a malleable, subjective concept that only allows card-carrying Party members to define it.

Once I've succeeded in convincing everyone that a toad is really a dog, I'm now free to re-describe the toad as a furry creature with floppy ears, a happily wagging tail, and a very agreeable disposition. We are, of course, still staring at that lumpy, tailless, floppy-earless creature whose disposition seems dour at best. But, no matter. We're increasingly seeing a dog because everyone has now agreed that this is so. Sort of a modernist version of the "Emperor's New Clothes."

Once you've allowed someone to obliterate the literal truth for you and replace it with a different concept you've agreed to accept in its stead, you've started your trip down the primrose path. You've given up your reason and are willingly allowing people to dupe you. This is not in your best interests, of course, but better this than not having any friends or having your reputation ruined overnight. The world you thought you once knew is gradually being replaced by a phony parallel universe, but if the "best minds" all agree, well, then, who are you not to go along? So you begin to accept this gradual redefinition of your universe via the stealth attack of language and meaning alteration.

Let's move on to my most recent favorite example of this: the word "progressive." Empirically speaking, this was and is the greatest scam in the lexicon of the American left. It's not a new term. It was certainly around at the very beginning of the 20th century and perhaps earlier. But what gradually happened is that this term was gradually adapted and accepted as an extraordinarily sanitized descriptor for a Marxist, Communist, or fellow traveler. Through nearly 1960, you could get in a peck of trouble if people labeled you a Communist. So even if you were, and proud of it, you had every reason to pretend you weren't. Which is where the "progressive" scam really came in handy.

"Progressive," to the average layman, is a nice word. If you're progressive, at least in the mind of John Q. Public, you're "with it," on top of the zeitgeist, totally hip and modern, and above all, fair-minded and open-minded. Who wouldn't want to be all of the above? Heck, even a giant American insurance company out of Columbus, Ohio--the one with the obnoxious cable TV commercials--is proud to call itself "Progressive."

Problem is, that's not what "progressive" really means anymore. "Progressive" has, for quite some time now, been the weasel-word for "reliably hard-left." It's a tremendously effective linguistic slight-of-hand. The average Joe, when he hears the word, thinks good things about the person so described. Yet simultaneously, lefty true believers and Party members hear "Marxist" when they hear "progressive" and are immediately reassured that a "progressive" individual is reliable. Ditto with "progressive" ideas.

When a Marxist votes for a candidate vetted as "progressive," he or she can be confident that the candidate has been wholly or mostly blessed by the leftist cognoscenti. When a non-Marxist average Joe votes for that swell-sounding "progressive," he's being, well, "progressive," as opposed to that Neanderthal thug the Republicans are running. That same average Joe, however, would be horrified if he found out that his "progressive" candidate was actually going to raise his taxes and ration his health insurance. However, he's unlikely to find this out until it's too late. Oh, sure, the Republican candidate has been telling him precisely this, but he hasn't been listening since the Republican is a Neanderthal thug who doesn't need to be listened to.

The "Progressive" language scam is, for me, the chief among many abuses of the language. Lots of perfectly good words have been tortured into dual-track meanings, with the "code" meaning one thing to hardcore leftists, and the generally accepted usage meaning something often entirely different to the uninitiated.

Fellow travelers of "progressive" include numerous word-pairs in the political lexicon.

Here's a few:

Activist vs. extremist. A left-wing agitator is merely an "activist," a wimpy obfuscation papering over the fact that a lot of "activists" would shoot you for disagreeing with them, if, in fact, they had guns. An individual described as an "activist" is ALWAYS on the left. If you're an "activist" on the right, you're not an activist. You are an "extremist," which, unlike the antiseptic, a-descriptive non-word "activist," implies that you're a very unreliable, violent-minded person who's gone off the deep end. Only conservatives can be extremists.

Moderate vs. partisan. If you're in favor of a leftist program or ideal, you're a "moderate," even if you happen to be a Republican. If you disagree with a leftist (usually Democrat) program or ideal, you're being "partisan." Therefore, as you can see, it's not possible for a Conservative or average Republican to be a moderate. He or she is, de facto, "partisan." Period. A delightful variation on this is the term "nonpartisan," as in "nonpartisan legislation" or "nonpartisan panel."

Like "progressive," "nonpartisan" means one thing to the cognoscenti and another to the great unwashed. To the latter, "nonpartisan" means that, "even the people we don't like agree with us on this so it must be really okay." However, to the leftist cognoscenti, it's implicitly agreed that anything "partisan" must have been originated or supported by Conservative Republicans. To simplify in current political terms: If you wholly swallow a law or program on the left, you're "nonpartisan."

PS: In this topsy-turvy terminological world, you need to remember one more thing. There are no leftists, socialists, Marxists, etc., or even liberals for that matter. In the end, their are only "moderates" (people who agree with the left), and "Conservative extremists." (More on this key issue in a future post.)

Let's do one more:

Militants vs. terrorists. Everyone, even on the left, actually understands that the people I currently prefer to call "Islamofascists"--the ones who want to obliterate the West and veil and enslave all women--are indeed terrorists, individuals who intend to impose their world violently upon ours. Indeed, the hard left probably admires them for this, as that could describe the left's own preferred political program for conquest.

But alas, to call a terrorist a terrorist is not in keeping with the Marxist tack of obfuscation. The left, in some way, feels that these terrorists are actually good guys, since they, like the left, want to overthrow Western society. So calling them what they are, "terrorists," might cause them to lose a great deal of sympathy. So instead, the left, and their minions in the press, call these mass-murderers "militants." This term implies that there's a certain justice in their activities where, in fact, there is none at all. But "militant" does supply a lot of cover for the terrorists, and the left is happy to do this. Like the terrorists, the left prefers to perform their dastardly deeds under cover. So if you're a journalist, you don't dare refer to a terrorist as a terrorist. He's merely a "militant," crazed by the unfairness of the West, and, of course, the evil Zionists of Israel.

As an all-too-obvious postscript, it has long baffled me that some of the greatest promoters of this "militant" terminology are Jewish intellectuals. In point of fact, they'd all be the first to be slaughtered if the "militants" ever achieved their goal of world denomination. But, yoked to a left-wing, Marxist ideology, these intellectuals blindly follow party "truth" even though doing so could very well lead to a real Final Solution. It would seem to me, at least, that the choice here is between maintaining Party discipline and committing suicide. In this case, suicide is apparently the preferred choice. It's something I will never understand.

Key to current Communist thought is that what many of us might call objective truth is, in fact, wholly subjective. Taking it one step further, the truth, for a Communist, is whatever the Communist leadership (aka "The Party") declares it to be. Since there is no objective, empirical truth, or, worse, since so-called objective, empirical truth is simply a scam by capitalists to keep themselves in power, The Party will define truth for us. And don't expect that truth to be logical, as pure logic is rarely of any use to the Party. It's simply too unreliable and capricious. And worse, it might be antagonistic to a Truth the Party has just declared.

If the Party says a toad is a dog, then it is a dog. Anyone arguing from evidence or empirical observation that a toad is a toad is immediately identifiable as an enemy of the Party. As an enemy of the Party, such an individual is immediately attacked by the Party and its minions, vilified, slandered, and, if possible, totally ruined in the eyes of the public which will then view such individuals not only as liars but as enemies of the Truth, which is, of course, whatever the Party says it is, which means that a toad is a dog. (If you doubt my word on this, follow the recent career trajectory of Sarah Palin.)

If anyone wants to truly understand how public manipulation has been conducted in the Western world over at least the last half-century, it's important to grasp this concept. It's what enables today's leftists to withstand and eventually triumph over the most withering of attacks. They simply don't recognize the standing of their attackers. They and their media backers denounce their opponents into oblivion--the 20th-21st century equivalent of book burning--and this dissent ultimately disappears from contemporary narrative.

Again, re: McCarthy. He's known today as a Communist Witch Hunter, which, in many ways he was. What no one seems to realize anymore is that Communist sympathizers and enemies of our government and way of life HAD infiltrated many of our institutions and DID (and still do) pose a danger to our way of life. Again, McCarthy simply could not have flourished as he did if there hadn't been at least some credible basis to his eventually out-of-control inquiries.

The universally-held myth of Joe McCarthy as 20th century America's villainous Witch Hunter General has now entirely obliterated the valid, initial reason for his Congressional investigations. His name has become an easy, convenient way to divert contemporary opponents of today's Communist flavors from pursuing any valid, rational inquiry on leftist endeavors. By immediately and unambiguously denouncing any opponent as a "McCarthyite," ideologues of the left quickly and permanently short-circuit dangerous inquiries and place said opponent permanently outside the circle of allegedly reliable people. (Again, witness the saga of Sarah Palin.)

Readers of Boomer age and older will immediately experience a variety of feelings when seeing this word, but it's crucial to understanding what's going on in today's political climate in the US. What follows is somewhat simplified, but hopefully reasonably clear.

In the beginning was Karl Marx. Or if you prefer, Hegel. Marxist thought basically focused on a radical alteration of society whereby the owners of the means of production (capitalists) would be overthrown by the workers they exploited (the proletariat) to create a radical egalitarian society where Everyman would get and give only what he or she would need and where no one would be exploited.

Lovely idea but a little impractical, so it was refined a bit by Engels and a bit later, by Lenin. As they focused things, Marxist philosophy took on more of its 20th century hallmarks: a hatred of the middle class (with much to lose to both the wealthy and impoverished, their comfort zone was a primary obstacle to radical revolution) and a lust for the destruction of organized religion which was then seen (fairly accurately at the time) as powerfully supporting and underpinning the status quo.

As the Russian Revolution unfolded, this pure idea stream--like the Christian religion--splintered into numerous offshoots, each purporting to possess exclusively the last word on Marxist Utopian thought. The result, like the various Protestant churches, was a bewildering variety of organizational flavors, among them the Reds and the Whites, the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks, the Marxist-Leninists, the Trotskyites, the Stalinists, etc. For those of us not of this persuasion, the terms tend to have the look and feel of NFL team names like the Browns, the Steelers, the Packers, etc. For most people, these flavors are all the same. And by the time the 1940s and 1950s rolled around, most of us simply used the term "Communist" to describe them.

It was a pretty useful term in its time, as it was a good general descriptor for left-wing radicals who:

Worshipped at the Church of Karl Marx

Believed that Western Capitalism (especially in the US and the UK) was the enemy of the people

Hated the middle class ("petit bourgeoisie") as perhaps the greatest obstacle to a successful revolution

Were convinced that only the bloody overthrow of Western Capitalist Democracies could ever provide justice for the working class

Quietly acknowledged that real "patriots" would ultimately deliver their wayward countries to the coming world socialist order under One Government, presumably located in Moscow

So, under the Communist label, the various flavors of Marxism were attacked, particularly circa 1940-1975 or so, as a malevolent force that did not observe Western values, boundaries, democracies, or power structures and sought to overthrow them by any means necessary.

This was the Communism that Joe McCarthy attacked in the Truman and Eisenhower years. The educational and media establishments have over the years focused on McCarthy's very real abuse of power and office in his pursuit of Communist subversives in the American government and elsewhere. But they've failed to acknowledge one simple fact: McCarthy could never have credibly launched his inquiries unless there were at least some truth in them. The vilification of McCarthy into our New Satan over the years has been a convenient way to paper over the unassailable fact that during and after World War II, the Marxists we called Communists were hellbent, one way or another, for overthrowing Western Democracy and replacing it with a dictatorship of the proletariat.

We're going to temporarily use the term Communist here and elsewhere to describe its various tenets before confusing you by trying to define its current flavors which are, in and of themselves, meant to confuse. Our next post describes some speech and thought patterns people need to be aware of--patterns used by ur-, current, and post-Communists to obfuscate and confuse.

I've been holding back on a series of posts because, frankly, it's been too difficult for me to contextualize the action. Problem? The original, original reason for the founding of HazZzmat a few seasons back: language. Or more specifically, the deceptive language arts developed by the propagandists on the left.

An understanding of leftist terminology is crucial to revealing how the manipulation of the general public has gradually occurred. So I'm going to do a short series of posts right now to establish at least some basic terminology and ground rules so that you can read my successive posts and understand that, rumors to the contrary, I'm not some kind of crank.

What I'm going to describe here are several words, terms, and phrases that are casually bandied about today by design. They've been created--or perverted--by the left and pushed into daily language usage to the point where they're no longer questioned. Well, I'm going to question them. Let's move on.

Friday, November 06, 2009

The brave soldiers who were massacred at Fort Hood had trained to fight the jihadist enemy abroad. But they seem to have ended up being murdered by the same enemy on American soil, in a place where they thought they were safe — murdered, apparently, because a series of military and medical officials recognized what was going on with this major and chose to do nothing about it...Fort Hood Massacre: A Day of Courage and Cowardice, Pajamas Media, 11/6/2009

There are times when the governing authorities seem more like the mincing courtiers serving Louis XVI, France's king before the revolution of 1789, than the representatives of democracies. They prance about their respective courts, whether in Brussels, Washington, or the Pentagon, pronouncing upon this and that as if what they can can see through stained glass, velvet curtains and silk has any resemblance to the real world. Of course, they represent no democracies at all, but the modern equivalent of Louis XVI, the unelected bureaucracy, lushly comforted by his or her entitlements. Such people, as Louis XVI found out, are not competent for anything except defending their own asses. Oaths, professional, moral, and constitutional, mean nothing to such people. All that matters is the pronouncement of superiority. In this case, that pronouncement disavows any connection with Islamic fascism and Fort Hood.

As Bawer, a very sharp commentator on Islamic fascism, reminds us who should not have to be reminded, this is another radical Muslim committing mass murder on Americans. The pity is that the killer isn't dead. Expect CNN to depict him as the victim, though. It's a thing with CNN to find victimhood in any villain. Let them prance in their veiled court as much as they want. We know the truth, don't we?

Wednesday, November 04, 2009

Headed for bed right now, but stayed up late enough to savor a Republican hat trick in Virginia and the probability of a Republican Governor-elect in the corrupt Democrat fiefdom of New Jersey. There's a little trouble right now caused by the Republicans themselves in New York's 23rd Congressional district--the Repub establishment backed a soft leftie candidate until it was probably too late. Luther will probably update us on this.

But for right now, I'll enjoy the Virginia trifecta--blowout wins for Republicans in the races for Governor, Lieutenant Governor, and Attorney General. No Dem even came close. All three wins were genuine landslides.

The pundits will talk about trends, lack of Obama coattails, etc. But it's pretty much all horseshit in the. They don't have a clue, as usual, and just like hearing themselves opine.

So here's the real scoop:

Each of the Dems' top Virginia were lousy candidates who ran lousy campaigns. Furthermore, each took negative campaigning to a level of badness and ineptitude equaled only by cult movies like Plan 9 From Outer Space--a film you watch because it's so unbelievably bad you can't believe you're watching it.

Never once was I able to glean from the Democrats' Virginia campaign ads a single shred of information as to what any of the candidates stood for. Every single TV ad simply spent its allocated minute or so slandering the Republican opposition. Not one of the three statewide Dem candidates ever advanced a single idea for governing in his or her TV ads. It was as if we were having another "anyone but Bush" campaign, except that no one bothered to tell the Dems that Bush was already gone and they'd need to run on something else.